Kraken

May 24, 2010
British fantasist Miéville mashes up cop drama, cults, popular culture, magic, and gods in a Lovecraftian New Weird caper sure to delight fans of Perdido Street Station and The City & the City. When a nine-meter-long dead squid is stolen, tank and all, from a London museum, curator Billy Harrow finds himself swept up in a world he didn't know existed: one of worshippers of the giant squid, animated golems, talking tattoos, and animal familiars on strike. Forced on the lam with a renegade kraken cultist and stalked by cops and crazies, Billy finds his quest to recover the squid sidelined by questions as to what force may now be unleashed on an unsuspecting world. Even Miéville's eloquent prose can't conceal the meandering, bewildering plot, but his fans will happily swap linearity for this dizzying whirl of outrageous details and fantastic characters.

May 15, 2010
New, hefty urban fantasy with a London setting—sort of—from Miville (The City& The City, 2009, etc.).

At the Darwin Centre in London's Natural History Museum, curator Billy Harrow shepherds a tour group toward the center's prize specimen, a giant squid that Billy himself helped prepare. Alas—squid, tank, preservative and all, have vanished! Whodunit? How? To Billy's disbelief, investigating police officer Kath Collingswood professes to fight sorcery with sorcery. But, as Billy will quickly learn but more slowly accept, the teleportation of the huge squid is but an opening gambit in a struggle to the death between shadowy magical gangs lurking in an unseen London whose denizens, human and otherwise, are adept in techniques unknown to science and unsuspected by orthodox Londoners. This colorful, swirling, often arresting, equally often ploddingly didactic backdrop involves the squid-worshipping Congregation of God Kraken and renegade squiddy Dane Parnell—he tries to shield Billy from Goss and Subby, terrifying, sadistic wizards sent by the Tattoo, a maniacal, disembodied gangster now inked into the flesh of a hapless victim by Grisamentum, London's greatest dead wizard. Meanwhile, the city's magical familiars—cats, beetles, you-name-it—led by ancient Egyptian tomb-spirit Wati, are striking for better pay and benefits. Somebody or something, ho-hum, intends to destroy the world. But less than a hundred pages in, the lack of a plot becomes a serious drag, and Miville doesn't seem to grasp that absurd does not mean funny.

Likely reaction: raised eyebrows, head-scratching bewilderment.

(COPYRIGHT (2010) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

June 15, 2010

The theft of the preserved body of a giant squid from the British Museum confounds the detectives sent to investigate the crime, but curator Billy Harrow sees the deed as a personal affront because the creature was in his charge. Billy's attempts to find the kraken takes him through a bizarre landscape filled with squid-worshiping cultists, a man with a living tattoo, a trio of special investigators whose methods defy description or reason, and a pair of deadly scoundrels whose names alone strike terror in the hearts of those who have seen their handiwork. Set in a modern-day London awash with strangeness, the latest novel by the author of Perdido Street Station combines brilliant storytelling with doses of eccentric humor and eerily compelling horror. VERDICT Not for the squeamish, Mieville's sprawling saga calls to mind the works of H.P. Lovecraft and H.G. Wells with a distinctive 21st-century spin and should draw a large crossover audience as well as genre fans. Highly recommended. [Ebook ISBN 978-0-345-52185-9.]

Copyright 2010 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 15, 2010
Mi'ville (The City & the City, 2009) returns to the world of Perdido Street Station, a fantasy London where anything is possible and where something threatens to end the world and burn the city out of existence. Billy Harrow is a dedicated scientist who never imagined being caught up in intrigue, but after he successfully preserves a giant squid, he comes to the attention of the Krakenists, an obscure cult that worships squids. When the giant squid mysteriously disappears from the museum in the middle of the day, Billy is drawn into the world of cults, magic, and Armageddon. He is arrested by the Fundamentalist and Sect-Related Crime unit (with a young witch as their tough-talking cop) and then escapes with Dane, a warrior in the Kraken church. Mi'villes fantasy is a rich literary work, full of wordplay and imagery that will appeal to literary-fiction fans as much as to fantasy readers. It is a very dense read, however, and lacks the thrills of City & the City, but Mi'villes dedicated readership will be willing to persevere to the end.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)